Dr. Laurie Mulvey, Director of the World in Conversation Center at Penn State University, was the keynote speaker at a NATO research conference in London in May of 2024. The conference, entitled Leadership Development for Multinational Military Operations, was designed to bring together leadership experts to address multinational military and civil leaders, researchers, and NATO partners.
As a part of the Science and Technology Organization within NATO, the conference gathered field and academic experts to evaluate previous research recommendations for building leadership competencies at various levels, based on the premise that better-equipped leaders will better respond to challenging environments. Identified from the research were six major capabilities and competencies, namely: Social, Cognitive, Personal, Professional, Transformative and Technological.
In addition to her role as keynote speaker, Dr. Mulvey led the workshop session on Social Competency and Capability and informed attendees about the work of World in Conversation, which both trains individuals to facilitate dialogues for groups in conflict and hosts facilitated dialogues for various stakeholders. Also in attendance was Dr. Keith Grint, Professor Emeritus at Warwick University and former Director of Research at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, who spoke of the imperative to talk about “followership” when talking about “leadership.” Dr. Mulvey’s approach of collecting and incorporating all views of a group of people directly addresses this need to hear from leaders and followers alike. Her work is built on the idea that every perspective-holder sees a crucial piece of the whole. Thus, all perspectives matter because otherwise, strategic decisions will be made without seeing the full picture, resulting in potentially ineffective or even harmful actions.
World in Conversation’s previous work with NATO, which brought together NATO cadets with civilians in Afghanistan, successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of World in Conversation’s approach. While the work of dialogue facilitators and military personnel at first does not appear to be an obvious fit, the need for NATO personnel to work well with civilian populations grows, and so must their skill sets. Dr. Mulvey’s research-based method of solution-building through facilitation speaks to the value and efficacy of on the ground engagement.
